Electronic messaging has become a prevalent means of communication. Electronic messaging is specifically advantageous for mass communication because one message can be sent to a large group of users. Users who receive the message may then reply by sending a response to the originator of the message as well as to other users in the group. If even a small portion of users reply to the original message, the volume of email messages resulting from the original message is greatly increased. Moreover, as users begin to reply to the responses to the original message, the total volume of messages may increase exponentially.
Electronic messaging applications may enable message threading to aid users in organizing messages. Message threading is an association of related messages. Typically, an email message thread consists of an original message and a series of replies sent between users in a group pertaining to the original message. However, as the volume of messages increases, the number of messages in a thread may become unwieldy. Consequently, messages in the message thread may evolve away or even veer from the original topic.
The amount of information in messages may also become progressively duplicative. As the users respond to the original messages and reply messages, more and more duplicative information may be included in replies as the replies include text and data from early messages. Therefore, as the volume of messages increases so does the amount of information in the messages even though the incremental information addition may drop. Accordingly, an electronic message thread may contain a vast number of possibly unrelated messages with increasingly duplicative information.